Page 179 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

Alfred Rosenberg

became for the Jews the alpha and omega of their later world-view,
it closed in time, once and for all, their image of the universe. Their
contribution was that it was created out of nothing. Anyway, the
Jews now had a wide-ranging knowledge: the Jewish god created
the universe one day out of nothing, he is expected to protect us and
will give us in the coming kingdom rule over all peoples. One sees
that the picture is complete, the view logical.
In an ancient Indian hymn it says:

Mine ears unclose to hear, mine eyes to see him;
The light that harbours in my spirit broadens,
Far roams my mind whose thoughts are in the distance.
What shall I speak, what shall I now imagine? 376

Is it not as if a wing of infinity executes in these words of
the Indian singer a further flap of its wing and raises itself from all
earthly confinement? Or, when the wise man at the end of one of
the oldest philosophical works on the creation of the universe ends
thus:

He the first origin of this creation,
whether he formed it all or did not form it,
377
... he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not.
Again it ends with a question. These feelers into eternity
are the leading out of a mind "that dwells as a potential wonder in
378
man", of "the wise ageless mind". The Indian feels in himself
something eternal, he beholds himself before an infinity, he cannot
bar to himself all the doors of the mind. But the Jewish mind is
nervous before such imaginations - if they occur to him. The Old
Testament is evidence of that. And Judah Halevi, perhaps the most
sympathetic personality that Jewry has produced, expresses himself,
internally frozen, in poetry in the following manner:

376
Geldner and Kaegi, 70 Lieder des Rigveda [Rgveda, VI,9,6, I have used the
translation of R.T.H. Griffith, The Hymns of the Rigveda, London, 1889.]
377
[Rgveda X,129,7, tr. R.T.H. Griffith]
378
Deussen's translation: AUgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie, Vol.1.
156